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No Hint of Rioting During My Hours with LA Protesters
By Romen Basu Borsellino | 12 Jun, 2025

I attended an anti-ICE protests in downtown LA and witnessed nothing even close to a riot.

On Sunday afternoon I lathered on some sunscreen, got dressed in the colors of the Mexican flag, and hopped on the Metro en route downtown LA’s anti-ICE protests.

For the purposes of full disclosure: I did not attend as a journalist. I was there in my personal capacity as the child of an immigrant. 

I was there to express my complete and utter disgust for what this Presidential Administration is doing. 

I was there to protest ICE agents showing up at schools and restaurants and Home Depots to round up our friends and neighbors, sometimes without explanation.

It was not hard to tell who else in my subway car was headed to the protests. There were two girls in Mexican soccer jerseys, a man with a keffiyeh around his neck, and a couple wearing Bernie shirts. 

I exited at the Red Line’s Civic Center, the closest stop to City Hall, where the protests were allegedly taking place. I emerged from the escalator to find people of every race, religion, age, and gender identity. 

It is fair to say that this crowd was largely made up of progressives. Assuming them to be Democrats, however, would be a mistake. This was about morality and ideology. It was not about partisanship. In fact, I have little confidence that even a member of Democratic Party leadership would have been met warmly.

The crowd waved Mexican flags and a few Palestinian as well. People held up handmade cardboard signs decrying ICE, the President, fascism and Naziism. And they joined in chants.

Many of the buildings in the immediate area had been tagged with graffiti, a tactic that likely divided the crowd. There seemed to be little disagreement, however,  on the message spray-painted in nearly every direction: “Fuck ICE.”

The thousands of protestors were spread out across several locations. 

One mass of people was marching down an on-ramp to the 101 freeway.  Soon, several hundred had brought LA traffic to a standstill. They held a massive painted banner that read “TRUMP MUST GO NOW! REFUSE FASCISM.” After looking on for some time, a police officer ultimately emerged from their SUV (which had been spray-painted) and asked the crowd to disperse from the road. They did so immediately.

Those who left the freeway returned to a main street that held the largest convergence of protesters. While everything I witnessed was 100% peaceful, I wasn’t there long before a few  members of the crowd began setting off fireworks, which continued fairly consistently for the next few hours. The noise was startling (granted, I have never been a fireworks guy). But what really truly scared me was the possibility that the firecrackers would be the justification that law enforcement needed. They might use it as an excuse to deploy teargas or rubber bullets. Or far worse. I left the area and kept walking. 

Another group of hundreds was assembled in front of LA City Hall. A man wearing a “Free Palestine” shirt and wielding a megaphone addressed the crowd. After denouncing law enforcement of all kinds — LAPD, ICE, The National Guard — he announced that the group would be marching around the building and encouraged those with helmets and protective eye goggles to stand on the front lines. 

When they started to march, I stayed put. While I saw nothing from this group that strayed from peaceful protest, the anti-law enforcement rhetoric led me to believe that this group might be a prime target for those in power. Maybe that was all the more reason to join in. 

I walked around on my own for a bit, participating in chants while on the move. I passed volunteers handing out water, bananas, and other snacks. I saw a lone woman standing in the middle of a busy street as cars zoomed by her in every direction. She held a sign that read “Donald Trump, I am  your mother.” Behind the sign, she was completely naked. 

At one point, I saw a Waymo — the driverless taxi service — held up by the protest. I found it a compelling image: The very technology that is replacing workers had been stopped by a protest on behalf of the types of workers who are under attack. I snapped a photo. 

Eventually, I found a spot on an overpass off the beaten path where I decided to hang out for a while. I waved to cars who drove underneath, honking in solidarity. From my new vantage point, I could look around and take the scene in from every direction, even the areas I was too scared to occupy.

After about 2 hours, the sun was getting to me. I decided to head back to the Metro three blocks away. It only took two blocks until the chants behind me were too distant to hear. 

The war zone I was promised by conservatives and the media was nowhere to be found. The so-called riots that allegedly justified the President’s deployment of the Marines and National Guard did not appear to exist. 

What I saw was a group of civically engaged members of the public who had simply had enough. Yes, there was more anger and swearing than "Kumbaya." But unlike, say, the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, the vast vast majority of this group was there to act within the confines of the law, whether they liked it or not. 

Yes, some parts of the protests made me nervous like the fireworks or the graffiti that would surely be used to portray the crowd as a bunch of foul-mouthed hooligans (I may be foul-mouthed but I’m no hooligan). 

I was shocked to get on social media that night and see the Waymo I had taken a picture of go up in flames. But once again, my issue was more with how this would hurt the movement. Would those in power use the actions of a few jerks to discount the thousands of well-intentioned peaceful protestors?

No, I don’t condone lighting driverless electric cars (or anything, for that matter) on fire. But I also have a limited capacity to care. In the grand scheme of things, some tech mogul’s well-insured vehicle is far less valuable to me than the thousands of human lives being destroyed right now by these ICE raids. 

I’ll also point out that, by the numbers, the actions of a small handful of troublemakers in a crowd of over 10,000 accounts for somewhere between 0 and 1% of that crowd.

While I would love to believe that the protests accomplished their goal of driving ICE out of LA, it is safe to assume that there is still a long summer of activism ahead. And I also suspect that as this continues, the bugs will get ironed out. It takes any leaderless movement some time to reach its full potential. 

At the same time, things may only escalate on the law enforcement side. After all, the military had not yet arrived when I got downtown on Sunday. 

I only hope that they keep things as peaceful as the protested did. 


While I saw nothing from this group that strayed from peaceful protest, the anti-law enforcement rhetoric led me to believe that this group might be a prime target for those in power. Maybe that was all the more reason to join in.

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